Design and Optical Simulation of a New Thermophotovoltaic System Based on Ta-Photnic Crystal Emitter and InAs Photovoltaic Cell

In this paper, design and optical simulation of a new thermophotovoltaic system is presented. In the proposed system, a Ta photonic crystal structure is used as an emitter section, and an InAs planar photovoltaic cell is used as absorber section. Based on the numerical simulation results, when the temperature of the emitter section is set at 1650k, the wavelength corresponding to the peak power transmission is around 1.7 micrometer, and the internal quantum efficiency will be optimum. For the temperature of 1650k, the internal quantum efficiency and the short circuit current of 77% and 62.5 mA/cm2 are achieved, respectively. The FDTD numerical method and analytical method (using of Matlab software) are used for optical simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed thermophotovoltaic system which contains the InAs planar photovoltaic cell, has a good performance as other state of art material (GaSb, InGaAsSb and InGaAs) and could well be used in solid-state energy conversion systems.